Wednesday Week 19 Year 1

If your brother sins against you, take measures to correct him. If he refuses to listen even to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. The discourse on brotherly correction which forms part of today’s Gospel reading affords us a peek into what was going on in the early Church. It appears one of the ‘big’ issues that the Church had to deal with concerned the treatment due to those members of the community who had fallen short of living the commands of Jesus. It might have happened that some members suggested expelling such individuals from the community, something that was obviously contrary to the virtue of forgiveness that Jesus required of his followers. From what they had learnt from Jesus, members of the community who sinned needed brotherly correction, an approach that would benefit both the straying members as well as the community. Brotherly correction involved exhausting all the available options in order to bring back a fellow member into the fold. However, if all the options fail, Jesus says, then the straying members were to be treated as gentiles or tax collectors. What did he mean by this? What kind of treatment was due tax collectors and gentiles? Gentiles and Tax collectors were not at the top of popularity chart of this community Jesus was addressing. Gentiles were unpopular, not because of any particular bad thing they had done, but simply because they were different. They were not beneficiaries of God’s revelation, and were not living according to God’s dictates. In other words, they were a non-people. Tax collectors, on the other hand, were collaborators with the foreign government of Rome in robbing the Jewish people of their wealth. And the fact that they made themselves wealthy by overtaxing the people did not help their case either. They were hated and loathed. But Jesus could not sanction their maltreatment. When Jesus met Matthew, he invited him to conversion and when Matthew accepted the invitation, he forgave him his sins. And when John and James wanted to call fire and brimstone on a Samaritan town (Gentile town), Jesus reprimanded them. We have to look into the life of Jesus to find out how he dealt with people who were different. He was nice to them. He talked to them. He let those who were considered ‘different’ follow him. He forgave those who were known sinners. Shouldn’t this be the best way to treat even those who have refused to listen to us, a people who have set themselves apart from us? Those who have gone astray should be sought out and given a second, third, fourth or even tenth chance. This is how it is for those who profess Jesus Christ as their master and leader.